Microsoft Office 2007 to Exclude PDF

Microsoft office 2007 will not have the ability to save documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF), owing to Microsoft’s ongoing dispute with Adobe, which developed the format. Users of the new Microsoft Office will have to download separate software to save documents created in Office products such as Word and Excel as PDFs. Microsoft is preparing to launch its own format in Office 2007 for saving documents that cannot be easily modified. The new format will be called XPS, which stands for XML Paper Specification. David Heiner, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel said Adobe had wanted Microsoft to charge customers for the ability to save Office documents in either the PDF format or Microsoft’s new, competing XPS format. Adobe had made this proposal because the inclusion of PDF files creation in Office 2007 would decimate Adobe’s low-end Acrobat business. Microsoft, however, didn’t agree to the proposal but offered a separate free download for PDF. In the end, the biggest loss is for customers as PDF was always portrayed as an open document format but now the vast user base of Office 2007 will not be able to use it without downloading it separately.